What Happened to Black Noir’s Face?

There’s just three episodes left of The Boys season four, and the trumpets of war have begun echoing across Vought-entrenched America. Indeed, with Cate and Sam — the Guardians of Godolkin — having seemingly joined the Seven in the tower along with Tek Knight, a Supe uprising looks inevitable at this point.

Everyone’s hopes, unfortunately, lie with Billy Butcher, who aspires to wring more doses of the Supe-killing virus out of Sameer Shah. Should he succeed in establishing that enterprise, it just might come down to picking off as many members of the Seven as possible before he succumbs to his illness. In such a scenario, the most likely targets would be The Deep, Firecracker, and the three aforementioned newbies.

Black Noir (or, at least, the poor soul who took up his mantle following the death of the original) would be in the running as well, and that ordeal would be far more humane than what the first Black Noir went through.

What happened to Black Noir’s face?

The above photo is just a before; we’ll spare you the after.

If you do choose to acquaint yourself with that severely graphic damage, however, know that it came courtesy of Soldier Boy, the leader of Vought’s original team of heroes Payback (a parody of the Avengers), of which Black Noir was a member.

Working alongside the rest of Payback to get Soldier Boy captured by the Soviets at the behest of Stan Edgar, Noir and the rest of his teammates took advantage of an attack by Nicaraguan and Russian troops to subdue him, but he managed to deal the aforementioned damage to Noir before they could complete their objective. Beyond the scars, Noir was also left brain-damaged and mute from the attack, giving his “silent vigilante” archetype a rather tragic root.

The original Noir was later brought over to the newly-established Seven once Edgar installed Homelander as the new face of Vought. He was killed in season three by Homelander for withholding information about Homelander’s biological connection to Soldier Boy and was replaced with a new Supe, donning the same getup and passing himself off as Black Noir.

Season four of The Boys is currently streaming on Prime Video, with new episodes releasing every Thursday at 12am PT until the season finale on July 18. A fifth season, which will also be its last, has been confirmed.